It seems preposterous, but there’s a major debate over who is worthy to invoke the presence and blessing of the Almighty on the leaders of this land we love!

“The news that Louie Giglio is no longer going to give the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration sent shock waves around the conservative Christian world,” reported Matthew Lee Anderson for CNN. “Conservative Christians are right to be concerned about what these events mean for their welcome in the public square."

“The Presidential Inaugural Committee and the White House have now declared historic, biblical Christianity to be out of bounds, casting it off the inaugural program as an embarrassment,” said Mohler. “By its newly articulated standard, any preacher who holds to the faith of

the church for the last 2,000 years is ‘persona non grata.’"

The Eisenhowers leaving church.

Mohler denounced a "new Moral McCarthyism of our sexually ‘tolerant’ age." During the 1950s McCarthy hearings, witnesses would be asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

"In the version now to be employed by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, the question will be: “Are you now or have you ever been one who believes that homosexuality is anything less than morally acceptable and worthy of celebration?”

“It is plain that classical liberalism has just told Louie Giglio that he can be accepted as ‘affirming and fair-minded’ only at the price of his theological convictions,” wrote Carlton Wynne. “In the coming years (and, of course, even now in the present), Bible-believing Christians will be more and more pressed to hide or revise their biblical convictions on a host of matters or else face being labeled 'intolerant,’ ‘backward,’ ‘bigots’ or even ‘evil.’

“The very philosophy that stands behind such a threat is both hypocritical and empty,” wrote Wynne.

“Giglio, pastor of Atlanta’s Passion City Church, is also founder of the Passion movement that brings tens of thousands of Christian young people together to hear Giglio, along with speakers such as John Piper,” wrote Mohler. “They urge a rising generation of young Christians to make a passionate commitment to Christ. In recent years, the movement has also sought to raise awareness and activism among young Christians on the issue of sex trafficking.

“Note carefully that both the White House and the committee were ready to celebrate Giglio’s activism on sex trafficking, but all that was swept away by the Moral McCarthyism on the question of homosexuality.

“Giglio has strategically avoided any confrontation with the issue of homosexuality for at least 15 years,” noted Mohler. “The issue ‘has not been in the range of my priorities,’ he says. Given the Bible’s insistence that sexual morality is inseparable from our ‘ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ,’ this must have been a difficult strategy.

Dr. Nelson Glueck at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration

“It is also a strategy that is very attractive to those who want to avoid being castigated as intolerant or homophobic. As this controversy makes abundantly clear, it is a failed strategy. Louie Giglio was cast out of the circle of the acceptable simply because a liberal watchdog group found one sermon he preached almost 20 years ago. The imbroglio surrounding Louie Giglio is not only painful, it is revealing. We now see the new Moral McCarthyism in its undisguised and unvarnished reality.”

But what about Paul's words to Timothy that all of us are to pray for our nation's leaders?

“Luke records a parable spoken by Jesus to a group of men ‘which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others’,” writes Amy Gordon on the “A Reason to Hope” website. Luke tells how two men went to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. “The publicans, in Christ’s day, were the tax collectors, traitorous Jews who colluded with the occupying Roman authorities,”